It is well-known that the only certain method for diagnosing the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease is a post-mortem examination of slides of brain tissue. You have to be dead to be certain.

In the case of President Ronald Reagan, in 1987 the cognitive explorer G. B. Trudeau (lead images) anticipated by 28 years the report by a group of Arizona State University researchers that there were early speech symptoms of the deterioration in Reagan’s brain, though they were not diagnosed as Alzheimer’s until 1994; and Reagan didn’t himself die of the disease until 2004. The report from the Department of Speech and Hearing Science, entitled “Tracking Discourse Complexity Preceding Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnosis: A Case Study Comparing the Press Conferences of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush”, can be read here.

Last August, Trudeau warned, three months before the presidential election won by Donald Trump, that “whatever else this election is about, it’s primarily a referendum on mental health.” The first diagnosis of Trump’s symptoms in office — reduction in the number of unique words, increase in conversational fillers and non-specific nouns — occurred this week, when a group of researchers from a London publication reported they had found in Trump “tentative signs that there is more method in the madness”.

Last night, in a 2 minute-51 second declaration of US war on Syria, Trump mentioned God three times – once to identify His parentage of children; once to invoke His advice on launching the new US war; and once to bless what remains of “America and the entire world”. This is the first time in American history that divine authority has been invoked instead of the US Congress — as required by Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution, and the by War Powers Resolution of 1973.

Click to watch and listen carefully to Trump’s declaration of war. The Arizona speech researchers are now studying the symptoms (pictured below, left) – Trump’s key-word pronunciations were halting; coordination between his eye and jaw was abnormally slow; he misread and misspoke at the one-minute mark when he got to the phrase, “in this vital national security interest of the United States”. At the one-minute mark, the inside of Trump’s brain has been captured by Trudeau in this Flow-Sensitive Magnetic Resonance Imaging (F-S MRI) simulation (right).

FWITZ! CRAK! KA-WHOM! are not the sounds which the Russian Foreign Ministry made when it issued its first response this morning at 10:27 Moscow time. “It is obvious that the cruise missile attack was prepared in advance. Any expert understands that Washington’s decision on air strikes predates the Idlib events, which simply served as a pretext for a show of force. Russia suspends the Memorandum of Understanding on Prevention of Flight Safety Incidents in the course of operations in Syria signed with the US.”

Read that last sentence aloud. It makes the CLICK! sound when the safety catch is released on a weapon.